Pattern idea: Service Level Agreement (SLA)

[dellagustin]

Problem

• Teams with resource constraints may be reluctant to adopt InnerSource (accept contributions), due to fear of missing resources to review and integrate them in reasonable time
• Contributors get frustrated to to lack of response or excessive delay on review and merge of contributions

Solution

The maintainers of the receiving component will document their Service Level Agreement (SLA) with respect to reviewing and merging / rejecting contributions and answering to bug reports, feature requests.

The SLA may also state no-warranty clauses (i.e. projects maintained in spare time).

Contributors will know up front what to expect before contributing, and can better decided whether to invest their time contributing, avoiding waste of resources and frustration.

Related patterns

• 30 day warranty
• Start as an experiment

References

• Martin Woodward (GitHub) at ISC.S11 - The 5 Myths of InnerSource - 8:48 - the slide states SLA for PR and issue triage

[spier]

The base documentation pattern recommends README and CONTRIBUTING files. The visualization for the CONTRIBUTING file mentions "time to expect for reviews". However the template for that file does not cover that.

@dellagustin Do you think that extending the existing pattern with the things suggested above would be sufficient? Or would it be better in a separate pattern? (and I would be curious about the why if you have an opinion on this :))

[spier]

@martinwoodward what do you think about this pattern idea?